I was watching LPB the other night, which is what I do whenever Diners, Drive-ins and Dives isn’t airing, and I came across a wonderful documentary by filmmaker Kevin McCaffrey called Cajun Food Traditions Now. It isn’t new (LPB first aired the piece in 2011), but it was new to me.
I called my son to the couch and told him to park it. I thought it was really important for him to see not only how his favorite foods are cooked and consumed in their native habitat but also how the animals and vegetables themselves are tended and harvested in south Louisiana.
My son was born in Baton Rouge, but he was raised in Oregon. He has always craved being able to claim some type of ethnicity beyond his actual heritage (if you’ve lived in Oregon, you’ll understand why), and south Louisiana’s cultural milieu seems as good a place as any to go hunting. “I hope you’re recording this,” he said after watching for five minutes.
The more I watched, the more intrigued I became by the story of fisheries in south Louisiana. In addition to the lush romance of the scenery and the ample evidence of the ingenuity and perseverance of the people of the region (and, of course, those marvelous accents), several other things came through loud and clear.
One is that seafood production and fisheries are a way of life in south Louisiana, not just a business. OK, that realization pulls up something short of profound for anybody who lives here, but it bears repeating. People in south Louisiana have a love affair with the water, and they view being able to make a living farming shellfish and seafood as a birthright. Don’t mess with it.
More than one person says during the broadcast that they would fish and trap even if it weren’t profitable. I believe them. One fellow talked about how he gave up the highly lucrative business of hauling in Gulf shrimp by the lockerful in favor of harvesting crawfish in individual traps because, he said, he wanted to feel like he was “catching something.”
Scene after scene shows two or three generations working together to extract a living from the land—or more precisely, the water. They gave truth to one of my father-in-law’s favorite sayings (and I paraphrase): Fishing is “a [darn] hard way to make an easy living.”
Second, and this is slightly more profound, I realized that what the show is really about is sustainability. The unspoken message of Cajun Food Traditions Now is: “We’ve got a really good thing going here in south Louisiana. It is the very model of sustainability. Shame on us if we screw it up.”
Perhaps the crowning achievement of sustainable fisheries in Louisiana was when, a generation ago, some bright spark at LSU came up with the idea to rotate crops of crawfish with crops of rice on south Louisiana’s vast prairie. Brilliant.
So we all support sustainability, right? Who could possibly be against sustainability? Any other approach is foolhardy and, well, not sustainable.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But can I tell you, in 16 years in Portland, Ore., I got my fill of that word. I don’t mean to suggest Portland maintains a prideful aura of “greener-than-thou” posturing, but I wouldn’t quarrel if you reached that conclusion on your own.
Actually, when it comes to my ambivalence about sustainability in the Oregonian sense, it is rooted not so much in the word itself but in what people mean when they say it. And that varies from region to region, state to state and person to person.
I realize I am so sensitive to the issue because I spent 20 years putting food on the table by handling media affairs for an energy company. I understand what “sustainable” doesn’t mean. And clearly it doesn’t mean taking finite resources—some of which are hazardous when roused from their million-year slumber—out of the ground and marching them across the continent for unregulated consumption by the vast hordes of us who selfishly demand cooked food and hot showers and personal transportation.
Hang with me here.
Like everybody else, I want a sustainable future for my son and daughter and their eventual offspring. At the same time, I am clear about what would happen to the economy and our way of life if the greener elements in Oregon and elsewhere were allowed to dictate which forms of energy we all can use and how that energy can be produced and transported. You wouldn’t like it.
I sleep just fine at night knowing that I contributed to the extractive economy and played a role in moving unbelievable quantities of carbon-based energy halfway across the continent (I had some help), but I also recognize that our current extract-transport-burn economy based on hydrocarbons is the opposite of sustainable.
We have got to face facts. The future must have less carbon—and not because carbon is inherently bad (although it is deeply flawed) but because it is inherently limited.
But don’t let anybody persuade you that we are in an either-or situation. Don’t buy into the false dichotomy that it is either immediate abandonment of carbon or planetary death—that the future is either carbon-based or green.
It has to be both. We have to use our current carbon fuels to sustain the economy until viable, commercial-scale, non-carbon sources of energy are available, affordable and practical. That day is not today. While I am not sure he really meant it, we have to adopt the “all of the above” approach to energy recommended by the president. Carbon needs to backstop the economy’s thirst for energy while non-carbon forms of energy are developed and deployed. And we are doing that.
The oil-and-gas boom will inevitably go bust. We have to be smart, like the people of south Louisiana. We have to think about tomorrow. Today would be a good time to start.
